May 27, 2012

WeOttaGo Delivers Relevant Data About Where To Hang Out on the Road

This past weekend, I hung out with the WeOtta founders Forrest and Grant Wernick, who gave me a demo of their mobile app, WeOttaGo -- available as a free download at the iTunes store. WeOtta is all about giving you more accurate refined data about what to do and where to go in a particular location.

Using machine learning and natural language processing (my past life -- aka Dragon Systems days), they harness, process and turn data that is unstructured into contextually relevant results that are most relevant to us in real time.

Example: you're in San Francisco or London and are trying to find a great wine bar that is still open now that dinner has finished and you look at your watch and it's after 11 pm. How many times do you struggle to think of a place to go that is close to where you're already at, even if you know a city relatively well. As an avid traveler, this happens to me all the time.

There a number of filters, including asking WeOttaGo for dive bar, a classy wine bar less than a mile away or a romantic Japanese restaurant.

It will return results that you can flag, save for later or to visit now.

They are working with major telcos to power their next generation of applications, search companies to enable them to serve up more contextually relevant local results, and a mix of other companies that operate in the local space to improve ad targeting. More about them here.